Narrow syntax and phonological form (review)

There are two issues in Germanic languages that have been heavily discussed in the literature in the last three decades: SCRAMBLING, the rearrangement of clausal and phrasal elements that has been found in West Germanic languages, and OBJECT SHIFT, observed in North Germanic languages. Although both operations displace an element across a clause-medial adverb or negation, which correlates with a change in the interpretation of the reordered element, they have been generally considered to be completely unrelated phenomena. Gema Chocan criticizes this common view and suggests a unified mechanism that she claims to license both. Although some authors have suggested a similar view in the past (e.g. Déprez 1994, Diesing 1997), their analyses were based mainly on syntax and/or semantics/pragmatics. The discussion in this book is novel in that it is modeled on an analysis of Scandinavian object shift (OS) developed by Noam Chomsky (2001) and proposes that both operations are linked to 'two of the most important findings about the connection between phonological features and Narrow Syntax: (i) the existence of special operations that spell out phonological features at points different from the completion of strong phases (Dislocation); and (ii) the sensitivity of strictly syntactic operations to the presence (or absence) of phonological features' (192).

Ch. 1 consists of a historical review of the literature on scrambling, beginning with Ross (1967), who considers it a purely stylistic, and thus fully optional, operation. The discussions in this chapter also include a review of types of scrambling, followed by a review of scrambling in Germanic languages, which is considered to be a unified operation based on the assumptions that (i) there is no long-distance scrambling in Germanic languages, and (ii) there is a distinct difference between West Germanic scrambling and North Germanic object shift.

Ch. 2 is an overview of those properties of German clausal structure that are relevant to scrambling. C adopts a non-Kaynean analysis of the clausal architecture in German in which the verb is base-generated in the final position. This view relies on the basic minimalist assumption that movement must be triggered, while operations into the preverbal position in an SOV language do not support the existence of any kind of motivation. C further makes a distinction between focus and regular scrambling; while the latter is clause-bound and iterative (more than one element can be scrambled), the former exhibits exactly the opposite properties.

Ch. 3 is a review of different types of scrambling in German, and consists of two major sections. In the first part, C discusses the syntactic properties of German scrambling. Among the uncontroversial issues, she provides data representing the iterability and clause-boundedness of this phenomenon (except for extraction out of coherent infinitives). As for the controversial data, she reviews different proposals about the type of elements that are subject to scrambling (only arguments or also adjuncts?), the locus of scrambling (only elements within VP, or also within DP, AP, and PP?), and the islandhood of scrambled elements (are they transparent for extraction?). With respect to island effects, C discusses scrambling as it relates to the freezing principle, and critically reviews the literature on this issue.

The second part of this chapter is focused on German scrambling at the interface, discussing the phonological as well as semantic/pragmatic properties of scrambling constructions. As for the former, C suggests that scrambled elements do not carry the nuclear stress, and the structure containing them involves 'marked' intonation patterns. In terms of the latter, scrambled elements involve different semantic/pragmatic interpretations. For example, indefinites receive a nonspecific, existential reading when in situ, and a quantificational, specific reading when scrambled.

In Ch. 4, C discusses two major theoretical accounts of scrambling: (i) the movement approach and (ii) the base-generation approach. With respect to the former, she focuses on purely syntactic theories, first within government-and-binding theory, and then reviews the movement approach within the minimalist program (MP). She rejects those views that consider scrambling a case of...